2009/11/04

It's that time of the year. When a beer or two and chorizo on any given night are welcomed without feeling bad about it, when the Garmin and it's HR strap are accumulating dust in the bike room, when riding is limited to getting from point A to point B and just ride for the fun of it. It's the off season, a time to let go a bit, rest the legs and the mind...

It's also a time to start planning next year. I'm currently drafting my training plan for 2010. Setting objectives and planning races, researching to build a better training plan than the last two years... Last winter, I started base December 1st but my base consisted almost exclusively of long zone 1 and 2 rides, junk miles as they say. I was accumulating lots of trainer time in front of the tv, 3-4 times a week for a few few hours. I was pedaling to and back from work everyday, only pedaling hard a bit when there was a lot of snow. It was a very old school base training and looking back, I'm not convinced I was making an efficient use of the limited training time I have.

This year I will probably start training around the same time but cut some hours of easy boring rides. Instead, I'll add more variety and keep some harder efforts mixed in the form of strength training, tempo rides, sweet spot training, leg speed exercises, fine tuning the pedal stroke and keep only one day for long rides, trying to do them outside even in the harsh Quebec weather or maybe even trading that for xc skiing depending on the conditions.

I'm not an expert in training by any means but I think it will be more fun and I wont lose as much strength and speed as I did last winter. What do you guys think?

2 comments:

In the past few years the long steady distance theory has pretty much fallen out of favor. Last year the rage was doing long tempo intervals. I was doing 6 to 8 min in the winter, then 20 min, and then finally 90 min tempo intervals in the spring. it was way more interesting, and my endurance was phenominal this year.

After the coaching conferences this year, alot of coaches are now suggesting 3 sets of 7, 20 sec all out efforts once a week. Apparently the intensity stimulates endurance. My coach will have me on those around christmastime.